American Appetites

by Joyce Carol Oates

  He was sweating inside his clothes. An old terror of sudden and unanticipated intimacy rose in him, a memory of other such situations when, thrown together with another person, whether a man or a woman, in one or two cases children, he had been taken off guard: had simply not known what to do. Glynnis would have known: would take the girl’s hands in hers and embrace her, speak soothingly to her, brush the damp strands of hair off of her forehead. It’s all right dear don’t be frightened dear I’ll help you dear there are people who will help you please don’t be upset. But Ian dared not touch her.

  He said, looking for a telephone, “I’m going to call an ambulance; you’re hysterical, you’re going to hurt yourself.”

  Sigrid cut her eyes at him and said, panting, “Leave me alone, just please leave me alone.”

  “Don’t be silly, I can’t leave you alone,” Ian said. He advanced upon her and said, “I don’t want to leave you alone.”

  Like Glynnis, though not so easily as Glynnis, Ian took the girl’s hands in his—both her hands, in his—and urged her to sit down. Suddenly obedient, she sat: began to sob, pressing her forehead, which was damp but surprisingly cool, against the backs of his hands. He thought, She is Bianca’s age; she is Glynnis’s young friend. So long as he could think of Sigrid Hunt in those terms, in that specific equation, he believed he would be all right. His alarm, his excitement, even his acute sexual arousal, could be contained.

  As Sigrid wept Ian told her, in a low, calm, unemphatic voice, as one might speak to a sick child, or an animal, that he could help her; he wanted to help her, if she would cooperate. He was not going to leave her, in any case. Not in the condition she was in. “What kind of drug have you been taking?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” she said. Then, “Just something to help me sleep.”

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Of course you know.”

  “I want to sleep and I can’t sleep, my head is filled with noises like breaking glass—”

  “Sleeping pills? Barbiturates? How many?”

  “—I want to die but I can’t even die.”

  Ian went into Sigrid’s windowless cubbyhole of a bathroom, looked through the medicine cabinet, found nothing (apart from bottles of vitamins, calcium, aspirin, “stress tabs with zinc”); rummaged in a little wastebasket beneath the sink, where, holding his breath against the close, ammoniac smell, as of backed-up drains and soiled towels, he found, hidden beneath a wad of filthy Kleenex, an empty plastic pill container with a prescription label for the tranquilizer Librium.

  “How many of these did you take?” Ian asked Sigrid.

  And Sigrid, looking away, suddenly very tired, said, so softly he barely heard, “Not enough, I guess.”

  “How many?” he persisted.

  “I don’t know,” she said. She hid her face in her hands, elbows on her knees, knees apart, in an awkward, provocative posture: the insides of her thighs exposed, a patch of pubic hair. Ian stood over her, looking down at her so that he could not see.

  He said, “Then I must call an ambulance.”

  “No, don’t, really. It isn’t necessary, really.”

  “But how do you feel?”

  “I don’t feel as if I’m going to die.”

  “How can you say that?”

  “Other times, there’ve been other times—”

  “Yes?”

  “When I’ve taken a lot more.”

  Ian said, in sudden distaste, “Jesus.”

  He urged her to lie back on the sofa bed, on top of the crimson spread; he switched off the radio, stood sweating and panting above her, not knowing what to do. In the slanted mirror a flushed excited man regarded him covertly: glasses sliding down his nose, nostrils widened, flaring.

  He said suddenly, as if he’d just now thought of it, “Your boyfriend, this Fermi—where is he?”

  “Not here,” Sigrid said.

  “Then where?”

  “Back up to Cambridge. He left last night.”

  “Did you have a fight, last night?”

  “Nights. The night before too.”

  “And what came of it?”

  “I’m going to have the baby. I said.”

  “You’re going to have the baby?”

  “The phone’s off the hook, isn’t it?”

  Ian looked about, in the mess, for a telephone. Yes, the receiver was off the hook.

  “I told him not to call me for a while, a day or two, but he might change his mind and call; and I can’t talk to him now.”

  Sigrid was lying very still, surprisingly docile now, her bluish eyelids heavy and hooded but her voice quite clear. The disheveled braid poked out stiff and clublike above her head as if she, and it, had been frozen in mid-fall.

  Ian said, “Have you seen a doctor about the pregnancy?”

  “No.”

  “Would you like me to find a doctor for you? There is an excellent medical center in Hazelton.”

  “Thank you, but no.”

  “I’ll be happy to; it’s no trouble at all. And if you are concerned about payment—”

  “It’s really an abortion clinic I want.”

  “The doctor could refer you to one, couldn’t he?”

  “I want a woman doctor.”

  “It may be that there is a woman doctor.”

  Though Sigrid could not see him, Ian smiled, smiled in exasperation; their exchange reminded him of nothing so much as one of the typically, and maddeningly, circumlocutious exchanges he or Glynnis was likely to have with their daughter, in which undercurrents of will and desire contend, like literal currents beneath the surface of a body of water, tugging one now this way, now that, in response to no evident pattern. He said again, “Let me help you, though. You called me, after all.”

  “It isn’t the baby’s fault. That’s the primary thing.”

  “I’m not sure that it’s the ‘primary’ thing.”

  “Then what is?”

  “Your health. Your well-being. Your—” And he paused, about to say, Your future. He said, “Simply your well-being. What you want to do, and not what another person wants you to do. Having a baby under such circumstances . . .”

  Sigrid said, in a vague, rather wandering voice, “But I love him too. The father.”

  “I’m sure you do,” Ian said. “Otherwise—” He laughed, but the sound was harsh, dry, and ungiving: the very sound of jealousy.

  Sigrid’s legs were not smooth-shaven but covered lightly, almost invisibly, with red-blond hairs. Ian felt an urge, an impulse, to kneel and touch, drawing a forefinger against the grain of the hairs . . . an urge, yet more powerful, to press his face, his hungry mouth, against her belly: against the wiry-soft mound of hair, red-gold too it would be, and curly, and warm, and damp, that most mysterious and secret of female hair, between her thighs.

  And she was pregnant, too; and that too was secret.

  He was thinking of, many years ago, his wife’s fresh young body: its beauty that had seemed to him amazing, and amazing that it was in a sense his. He was thinking, his breath coming now quickly, the sweat breaking out more frankly beneath his arms, of how he’d made love to her, that first time; and the other “first” times: that summer in Italy and the subsequent winter in Cambridge, the long mornings when they’d deliberately stayed in bed, the long nights when they’d gone to bed early . . . before the baby was born, and their lives were irrevocably altered.

  Yet their lives, it had always seemed to Ian, when he was in one of his brooding, involuted moods, had been irrevocably altered before Bianca’s birth: Glynnis’s very pregnancy and her moods, that so excluded him, that (and he was certain he did not imagine or invent) Glynnis willed might exclude him. For her exultation, her supremacy, in pregnancy, childbirth, nursing, had cut him out: made him feel not only irrelevant but, so often, in the way; his wife looked at him and felt the obligation of love, for of course she did love him, while another kind of love, sheerly physical, instinctual, as in
timate as her own flesh, pulled at her. As hot, heavy, urgent, he guessed, as the milk in her breasts that gave pain if it was not released.

  And she had insisted, both times, upon natural childbirth; the psychoprophylactic method, as the medical texts called it. And Ian too, of necessity, had been involved, had of course been involved: attending classes with her, going through her exercises with her, breathing with her, at first wholeheartedly and then with increasing concern and apprehension. For, both times, Glynnis’s obstetricians had warned her and Ian against natural childbirth: the pregnancies were not quite right; too much labor, too much pain, might be involved, a protracted strain on both the mother’s and the babies’ hearts. The obstetricians had issued their warnings; but Glynnis, being Glynnis, chose not to listen. She wanted, she said, to be fully conscious: to be in control of what was happening and not controlled by it. “Childbirth under anesthetic would be like making love under anesthetic,” Glynnis had said half seriously. “I want at least to know that I’m alive.”

  So Ian had endured the labors with her, the first eleven hours, the second eighteen: unspeakably long hours of pain, unmitigated agony, poor Glynnis’s screams so piercing Ian believed they must have penetrated the hospital walls. If he chose he could hear those screams still, those guttural cries with their note of sheer disbelief and astonishment, as if the sufferer could not quite believe that what was happening to her was really happening. At the height of labor he had assisted the obstetrician in a pelvic examination, each time, and had, each time, almost fainted: helping his wife (herself helpless, slick with sweat and flat on her back) fulfill herself as a woman. As if, he thought, she were a portal by which the invisible universe became visible . . . the inchoate God of mere spirit heaved into living flesh. Had not a mystic named Bousquet, of whom Ian McCullough had never heard, declared that mankind wants to be the soul of those forces that created him? So Glynnis said, and so Glynnis believed.

  It was a miracle, and he bowed before it; it was a miracle, and he would not have denied it. But the hours of agony, and the hours of screams, and the tears, and the sweat, and the blood, and his wife’s beautiful face contorted beyond recognition, like the face of a sinner in hell—in liquefied hell . . . like the face of one of the damned, the anonymous damned, on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel—those hours had frightened him deeply, as if the marrow of his bones had been permanently chilled. And the second infant had died.

  Ian had been impotent, intermittently, for months following both births. He had nightmares, sudden seizures of panic, dread, resentment, fury. He did not blame Glynnis for his own weaknesses, whether physical or emotional; nor did he, he was certain, blame her for the infant boy’s death, for her loss after all had been greater than his. And yet, sexually aroused, he was likely to feel a contrary emotion, of something very close to visceral panic. For to enter another person in love is to violate the other in pain and bring about, at once, or in time, irrevocable loss.

  He stood above Sigrid Hunt, who seemed to have fallen asleep, thinking these thoughts—indeed, being overcome by them—and could not have said, afterward, how long he stood there, his senses sharpened to the point of pain and his heart beating hard, angrily, as if in the presence of an adversary.

  3.

  He remained with Sigrid Hunt for most of that afternoon, at first watching over her while she slept (alert to alterations in her breathing that might mean she was slipping into a deeper and more dangerous sort of sleep), then reasoning with her (and Ian McCullough was at his most eloquent when “reason” came into play): persuading her finally that, in her special circumstances, terminating her pregnancy as quickly as possible was the only solution, a solution both humane and logical. Ian had perceived early on that of course the vain young woman did not really want to have a baby; but she did, no doubt, want the struggle, the agon, of wanting it and being denied it: or, rather, of being compelled (out of her own magnanimity, for instance) to sacrifice it to necessity. She was vain, but she was also tractable: far more tractable than Glynnis.

  So, in the end, she acquiesced—“I suppose you’re right; I see your point of view”—precisely as Ian had anticipated, as a gesture of submission to him. As if she could allow herself to go against her heart’s desire, to be coerced into doing wrong, moral wrong, only at the urging of another.

  By degrees Ian’s eyes, which had been, since boyhood, abnormally sensitive to gradations of light—blinded in stark sunshine, weak in the dark—became accustomed to the attenuated light in Sigrid Hunt’s flat; as, by degrees, he’d stopped hearing the barking dog in the adjacent yard. He had time, while Sigrid slept, to consider, in detail, his surroundings and to wonder, dispassionately now, why he was here; what urging, as of a hand pressed rudely against his back, had brought him here? With its low ceiling and exposed floorboards and crooked blinds and grimy windowsills, with its quarreling decorative “touches”—the orange, red, and parrot-green carpets, three Georgia O’Keeffe flower-abstraction reproductions on the walls, several aggressively ugly junk sculptures of the kind executed solely by friends—it seemed to him both squalid and intensely romantic; like the room in which he’d lived for a year, the most emotionally turbulent year of his life, in Ann Arbor, in 1959.

  He had been a scared boy of twenty-two, skinny and round-shouldered and chronically perplexed, overworked in his graduate studies and exhausted by self-imposed deadlines and tyrannical dreams of perfection, prematurely weary of living, like a creature in whom spasms of life articulate themselves even as the creature sinks, ebbs, dies, like a pebble tossed carelessly into a pond: its very weight, its quidditas, dooming it to extinction. Ian McCullough had come to the University of Michigan on a fellowship, suffused with enthusiasm for the future, and within two months he had lapsed into depression, compulsive thoughts, a preoccupation with suicide: a preoccupation with the horror of realizing that, in his flesh, in his skin, in his very being, he was incapable of determining any connection with anything or anyone outside him. Just as we lie alone in our graves, so indeed do we live alone, he’d thought repeatedly, so hypnotized by these damning words that he’d long forgotten where he had first heard them. He had never told anyone, not even Glynnis, not even Denis Grinnell, of the visit he had once made to the most highly regarded professor in the Michigan philosophy department at that time, a former student of Wittgenstein, in order to confront the man with a proposition: “If there is no logical, no necessary, no causal connection between interior and exterior consciousness, shouldn’t we all kill ourselves? What is the point of continuing?” The reasonableness with which these words were spoken quite belied the desperation behind them, but the man merely smiled at Ian, as at a son, and said, “You’re undernourished, you’ve been neglecting your health, I know the symptoms: your blood sugar is down.”

  Not long afterward, in any case, Glynnis entered his life: and changed it forever.

  Their meeting was sheerly accidental: Ian had been in a cafeteria, “behaving strangely,” as Glynnis afterward said, as if he were dizzy, or walking in his sleep; suddenly his nose began to bleed, and he seemed helpless to deal with it: blood on his shirt, splotches on the floor, so very red, so suddenly and humiliatingly public. . . . Desperate, he’d searched his pockets for a tissue but found nothing. And a very attractive red-haired girl advanced upon him, asking matter-of-factly, “Can I help?”

  Yes. Yes. Oh yes.

  HE WAS SAYING, now, to Sigrid Hunt, in his most practical, fatherly tone, “This doesn’t mean that you are cruel, or selfish, or vindictive—or ‘unnatural.’ It doesn’t mean that you might not, at another time in your life, really want to have a baby.” Sigrid listened, listened very hard. “And if it’s a question of money. . . .”

  She shook her head slowly, wiped her face with a towel soaked in cold water that Ian had given her. “I can’t accept money from you,” she said. “Even as a loan.”

  “Surely, as a loan?”

  “I just don’t think I can do that, Dr. McCullough.”
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  “Are we back to ‘Doctor’!”

  Ian smiled, stared at her, thinking, Why am I so angry? I am in no way an angry man.

  “But I think you had better do that, under the circumstances,” he said gently. “Don’t you?”

  She stared at the floor, wriggled her bare, dirty toes. In moving she released a scent, an odor, of flesh upon which perspiration has newly dried, gummy, talcum-y, reminding Ian of those days, now long past, when he’d changed his infant daughter’s diapers: the relief in tossing away the soiled diaper; the small cheery reliable pleasure of affixing the new into place; the comforting smell, now long forgotten, of baby powder.

  Sigrid said, not meeting his eye, “But this is a loan, of course. I’ll repay it as soon as”—and here her voice dropped, grew vague again—“as things fall into place in my life.”

  By chance Ian had forgotten to remove his checkbook from his overcoat pocket the day before, so it was no trouble to make out, to the order of Sigrid Hunt, a check on his personal account for the sum of $1,000. He had no idea of the cost of an abortion, nor did he want to know, even as he guessed that Sigrid’s intention of repaying the loan would come to nothing.

  She will pocket the difference and consider it money earned, he decided. And this thought for some reason pleased him.

  Sigrid took the check from him and frowned at it, as if, even now, she might reconsider. But she said, “Thank you, Dr.—I mean Ian. Thank you so very much.”

  The pupils of her eyes were dilated, like a cat’s, and their whites threaded with blood, rather yellowish, like smooth-worn coins; she was still “tranquilized” but determined now to behave with composure, dignity, even a belated social tact. She tied the sash of the terry-cloth robe more tightly around her waist, stuck her feet into slippers, smoothed her hair back from her face with a deft double movement of her hands. She asked, “May I make you some coffee? Though I’m afraid it isn’t very fresh. Or would you like a—”